Re: WebServer using https

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 22 May 2013, at 11:24, Martin Waschbüsch IT-Dienstleistungen 
<service@waschbuesch.it> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I hope I subscribed to the right list for this sort of question. If not, 
> please point me to the correct one.
> 
> Anyway, for a project I am working on, I am planning to provide a RESTful web 
> service. Since said service is targeted at IOS devices, I thought it would 
> make sense to develop the API using Objective-C, too.
> So, I set up GNUstep on a box running Debian Wheezy and compiled the 
> WebServer library / package.
> 
> The testWebServer application worked fine and after looking at the code in 
> testWebServer.m, I attempted to switch from http to https by changing:
> 
> [server setPort: [defs stringForKey: @"Port"] secure: nil];
> 
> to
> 
> [server setPort: @"443" secure: [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
>              @"/tmp/server.pem", @"CertificateFile",
>              @"/tmp/server.key", @"KeyFile",
>              @"somepassword", @"Password",nil]];
> 
> 
> From what I saw in the documentation and sources, that is how I understood 
> the syntax and compilation showed no errors.
> However, the application always responds with a line like this:
> 
> 2013-05-22 12:13:13.516 testWebServer[15071] Failed to listen on port 443
> 
> The weird thing is that, it does not even matter if I give a filename or not, 
> so the problem must occur before the NSFileHandle is created on that file.
> There is no other service listening on said port, and although I run the test 
> as root, I also tried a higher port (>1024) - just in case. 
> I double-checked that binary is linked against libgnutls, libgcrypt, etc. 
> which it is and am at a loss now as to what I may be missing?
> 
> Thanks for any and all pointers,

Acting as a server on port 443 (or indeed any port lower than 1024) is 
typically prevented by the operating system unless a process is running as root.
If your process isn't running as root, you could try changing it to run as root 
(not something I'd generally recommend) or use a different port.